Announcing the 2026 Annaghmakkering Residency Awardees

We are excited to announce the awardees of the 2026 Irish Writers Centre Annaghmakerrig Residencies.

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Created in partnership with the Tyrone Guthrie Centre, these residencies will provide each of the awardees with a one-week stay at the Tyrone Guthrie Centre (County Monaghan) in order to develop their writing practice. Read more about the awardees below.

 

Daniel Colm is a writer from Limavady in the north of Ireland. Queer and strange, he ‘fled’ his hometown at nineteen and spent the following decade learning languages and travelling across Kazakhstan, China and Ukraine. After a homecoming in 2023, he began investigating his own country through the lens of a halfway foreigner. His work deals with alienation, depersonalisation and cultural collision, and his guiding aim is to make the familiar strange and the strange familiar. He is currently learning Irish. His passions include yoga, hiking and travelling to Brazil.

 

Thérèse Kieran lives in Belfast, she writes poems and makes art. Her work has been published in anthologies including: Washing Windows, The Trumpet, The Apiary, The Honest Ulsterman, The Storms, Poetry Jukebox and in 2023 she featured in Dark Angels: Three Contemporary Poets by Paekakariki Press. She has been long-listed twice for the Seamus Heaney New Writing Award and in 2016 she co-conceived and curated ‘Death Box’ an exhibition of poetry and prose about death. She’s received two ACNI awards. She is currently studying on the MA poetry programme at QUB and is Vice-Chair of Irish PEN/PEN na hÉireann.

 

Nicole Morris is a working-class poet and essayist whose writing has been featured in The Stinging Fly, The Pig’s Back, Banshee, and elsewhere. She is the winner of the 2026 Cúirt New Writing Prize and a recipient of the 2025 Arts Council Literature Bursary. A Tin House Workshop alum, Nicole has been awarded residencies at Arteles Creative Center in Finland (2026) and at the Cill Rialaig Project in Co Kerry (2027). Originally from Los Angeles, she lives in the West of Ireland, where she never tires of the wind or rain.

 

Caitlyn O’Reilly is a poet, collector, and novelist. She has been published numerous times with MISC, Flare Magazine, and more. Most recently Caitlyn was commissioned for the Irish Traveller Stamp at the GPO and again as apart of an exhibition for the Traveller Health Project with the South Tipperary Arts Centre. She is also a 2026 EDI Artist Bursary Award winner with the South Dublin City Council. A 2022 Edna O’Brien Bursary winner and an Irish Writers Centre Cill Rialaig residency 2025 recipient, Caitlyn is currently working on her debut novel, multiple poems, and a novella. Her anthology, From Ruin to Road, is to be released August 28th in collaboration with the Museum of Literature Ireland. She can be heard speaking on her project on RTE Radio’s Poetry People.

 

Tenaya Steed is a writer and artist. Her stories have been published in The Stinging Fly and won the Michael McLaverty Award and The Stinging Fly/FBA Fiction Prize. She lives and works in Dublin.

 

My name is Roman Vai Smith and I am a third generation Italo-American writer from Pennsylvania. I have recently finished my Master of Arts in Creative Writing at DCU. Starting a child actor, I moved to Ireland in 2022 to study acting at the Lir. My first stage show, a farce about flat sharing, was self produced by a theatre collective Off the Scéal and culminated in a three night performance on Pearse Street. Since then, my dramatic works for have been received in New York, Philadelphia, and Dublin and my writing has been published in Channel Magazine, Phase Zero, and Orange Crate Magazine. This summer, I am working with Colin Barrett on a satirical novel about squatting. I am looking forward to meeting the other writers in Annaghmakkerig and having time to work on my draft.

 

About the Tyrone Guthrie Centre

The Tyrone Guthrie Centre is a cross-border organisation that offers time away, space to work, and opportunities for collaboration and networking for artists that facilitates the development of their practice across all art forms.

Annaghmakerrig House is situated in the quiet countryside of County Monaghan, and together with our self-catering cottages, our studios and performance spaces, as well as our lake and our forests, gardens, and fields, The Tyrone Guthrie Centre is a place where creativity flourishes amid the many pressures and distractions of contemporary life. Providing a quiet environment that esteems, supports, and develops our artists is what we do, but we aim to do it more holistically by creating audiences for our artists where appropriate, and by creating partnerships with organisations such as The Irish Writers Centre for the benefit of artists from all communities on the island of Ireland.